Years before The Girls Next Door made Holly Madison a star, Playboy had another reality show that followed the brand’s search for a new model — and one contestant is opening up about her time on the Fox special.
“Playboy was not my dream,” Shallan Meiers recalls in Us Weekly‘s exclusive clip from season 2 of Secrets of Playboy, premiering Monday, July 10, on A+E.
Meiers was working as a waitress at Spago in Las Vegas when a scout from Playboy approached her and asked whether her breasts were real. “My face just looked like this,” Meiers explained before miming an expression of shock. “I let her know I was only 20, so she told me I should talk to my mom.”
Before her conversation with the scout, Meiers had “never even seen” an issue of Playboy, so her mother advised her to flip through a copy and see if she felt “comfortable” after looking at the photos.
“I remember looking at the Playboy and thinking, ‘Wow, these women are gorgeous,'” Meiers told the camera. “I thought there was no way they could make me look like those girls because those girls — they just don’t look real.”
Meiers’ interest was piqued after looking at the magazine, but she was still a bit apprehensive about the idea of posing nude. “I knew whatever [the scout was offering] was a big opportunity, it’s just whether or not I could be comfortable enough to go through with it,” she recalled. “What I told my mom is, ‘I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to get naked.’ She goes, ‘Well, there’s only one way to find out.'”
At the time, Meiers was “incredibly shy,” to the point that she felt “uncomfortable” even walking around in her bathing suit. “I was scared, but tired of being scared,” she said, adding that she eventually said yes because she was afraid of having regrets in the future.
Meiers ultimately appeared on the Fox competition show The Girl Next Door: The Search for a Playboy Centerfold, which aired in 2002. She was one of seven semifinalists but lost to Lauren Anderson, who was Playmate of the Month in July of that year.
Anderson is also set to appear in season 2 of Secrets of Playboy, which will explore the aftermath of several women’s associations with the brand. Season 1, which featured interviews with Madison, 43, and Bridget Marquardt, aired last year.
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Madison later said that it was difficult for her to watch the docuseries after sharing her experience with its creators. “I watched all of them except episode two. I don’t want to watch myself talk about my trauma again,” she recalled during an August 2022 episode of her “Girls Next Level” podcast. “I can’t take it. But every other episode, I watched — and it came out over the course of 12 weeks. I had nightmares after I watched them. I had a nightmare I was back at the mansion every single night after Secrets of Playboy.”
Secrets of Playboy season 2 premieres on A+E Monday, July 10, at 9 p.m. ET.
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